What is the minimum viable ad length?

It depends! (Classic marketer answer)

Ads need to reach an “identification threshold” — the minimal time to be recognized and spark emotion. Conventional ads do this quickly, while unconventional ones take longer but gain little from extra attention afterward.

How do you apply this?

Typical ads benefit most from more frequent but shorter exposures, whereas atypical ads benefit most from longer exposures (even if it’s less frequent).

Nitty Gritty

This study put two schools of thought in the ring:

  • Total Time Hypothesis: duration > frequency
  • The New Skool (doesn’t have a name yet?): frequency > duration

🥊

I’m writing this post in real time as I read about the study and results. My gut says the new skool will win. Repeated exposures cause interesting things to happen in the brain. And the sheer volume of daily content exposure suggests one exposure would be washed away in the tide, even if it were of decent duration.

10 (seconds) is the magic number

For the typical ad, this optimum is reached around 10 seconds. Every second after that point does not further help recognition and it actually make the ad less appealing.

Of note: here, ‘typical’ means “follow brand and category conventions.”

Except when it’s not

Longer durations benefited…

ads that dared to stray away from the beaten path and adopt a more atypical approach. By atypical, we mean creative narratively driven ads, surprise ads and ads that did the exact opposite of with the majority of their competitors did. For these types of ads, reaching the optimum threshold of attention took a bit more time.

The brands and products that were embedded in atypical ads were better recognized with each passing second, all the way up to the 70 sec maximum.

I’m guessing Old Spice is the atypical poster child. You know which campaign I’m talking about.

Basically, people need more time to figure out WTF is going on with these ads.

As for liking, the optimum for atypical ads lies between 20 and 30 seconds

6-10-16-20+

This is another data point to add into the how to make a video toolkit.

  • 6 seconds to hook attention
  • 10 seconds to make the brand and product identifiable before you overstay your welcome (unless you’re a weirdo (long live weirdos!))
  • 16 seconds to game Meta’s ThruPlay optimization (according to them)
  • 20-70 seconds to be a weirdo/storyteller

TL;DR: make your standard video ads 10 seconds long.

Pretty graphs and recommendations at New Neuro Marketing.